Twice Human
by Mnemosyne's Elegy
Summary: Natsu is brushing his teeth when he blinks and sees a demon in the mirror. Unfortunately, the demon slayer of the group is avoiding him, and Happy and the girls seem more concerned about fish, books, and bakeries.


**Note: Hey, look, I finally got around to writing something new for FT again X)**

* * *

Natsu was brushing his teeth when he blinked and saw a demon in the mirror. The brush stilled in his hand, mint stinging his tongue. White suds spilled from one corner of his mouth and down his chin. He wiped them off with his sleeve.

There was nothing particularly frightening or ghastly about toothpaste-smeared lips or the bad case of bed-head tugging his hair in every direction, but for just a second he could have sworn…

He tilted his head and studied his reflection. There was no red staining his eyes, no blood running down his chin, no horns sticking out of his tousled hair. The fingers holding his toothbrush were tipped in short, ragged nails caked with grime, not claws. He opened his mouth, and a flood of white foam poured down his chin and splattered on the counter.

Coughing out a curse that only made matters worse when he swallowed toothpaste, he rinsed his mouth out and cleaned his toothbrush before baring his teeth again. He studied them critically in the mirror, but none of them seemed to have grown into fangs overnight. Maybe a few of them were a touch pointed, but they had always been that way. Dragon teeth, not demon teeth.

He shook his head and put his toothbrush back in the cup. Ridiculous. There had only ever been him.

"_Natsu!_" Happy cried. He appeared in the doorway, reflected over Natsu's shoulder. "What did you _do_? Look at the mess you made!"

Natsu tore his gaze away from his reflection. Toothpaste drool still drizzled the counter and stuck to the sides of the sink in globs. He rolled his eyes and grabbed the hand towel wadded up in a ball beside the basin.

"It's not that bad."

"But it's _gross_! And now the towel is ruined!"

"Quit being such a drama queen. Clearly, you've never watched yourself eat a fish. Anyway, I don't think we've washed this towel in years. It's probably time to burn it and get a new one. We can swipe one from Lucy's place."

"Wait, what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I'm pretty sure this used to be white at one point. I wonder if we can convince Lucy to get a brown one for us so that it won't change color."

"Not the stupid towel! About the _fish_."

"Ah… Just that I was thinking we should fry some fish for breakfast."

Happy eyed him suspiciously before allowing himself to be mollified. "Yay! Fish! Hurry up, Natsu!"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm coming."

Natsu threw one last glance back at the mirror, but he looked like just himself and Happy just looked like Happy. He turned to find Happy watching him, head tilted at a quizzical angle.

"Are you okay, Natsu?"

Natsu smiled. "Of course."

"You look like you're thinking really hard, and you barely even think really light."

"I do so think!" He flipped off the light and tramped out to the kitchen, Happy trailing behind. "I'm just thinking about what it means to be human, I guess."

"Has your brain exploded?" Happy asked in alarm. "_Philosophical _deep thinking? You didn't get taken over by aliens, did you?"

"No. Not aliens."

Natsu opened the fridge and made a face. He had promised Happy fish for breakfast, and now he would have to follow through or his friend would whine _all day_. He pulled out the large fish they'd caught at the grocery since they didn't have much time to spare for fishing trips these days. His eye caught on the bacon taunting him from the back of the shelf. Bacon was the most proper breakfast food, but his forays into bacon-wrapped fish had not ended in triumph and he couldn't bring himself to even put them on the same plate anymore. Sighing to himself, he went about peeking into all the pans piled on the counter to find the least dirty one.

Happy watched him from his perch on the table. "Humans are so obsessed with this idea of being 'human', anyway," he said with a disdainful sniff. "I'm glad I'm not a fish, but I don't spend all my time thinking about how much better it is to be a cat."

Natsu smiled despite himself as he selected his pan. "I guess it wouldn't matter to you as much, not being human and all."

"And thank goodness for that! You humans are an odd bunch. Being human is overrated. Anyway, I don't see why it matters. You're just Natsu."

The stove sputtered to life, and Natsu watched the flames licking at the bottom of the pan. Just Natsu. That sounded good.

For just a second, he thought he caught a glimpse of something twisting among the flames. But he shook his head. He was just Natsu and fire was just fire and everything was as it should be.

* * *

Natsu tapped his foot impatiently as he waited for Erza to turn her attention on him. She had become especially bossy again lately, even though Makarov was recovered and back in action. She seemed to take great delight in ordering everyone around.

Natsu breathed in the scent of fresh-cut pine and new varnish, let his fingers tap dance across the tabletop, and wondered if he could sneak out of the guild without Erza noticing.

"Do you think we should make a run for it?" Happy whispered a little too loudly. Thankfully, Erza was too caught up in handing the Strauss siblings their daily assignment to notice.

"You can't just sneak out!" Lucy hissed, leaning across the table to jab a finger at him. "This is a team effort! There's still a lot of work to be done!"

"There will still be plenty of work left for tomorrow if we go fishing today," Happy whined. "Don't you want to go fishing, Natsu? That store fish just isn't the same as fresh fish."

Natsu hummed absently in agreement, but he was watching Gray across the hall. The demon slayer was with Juvia, of course, and about as far away from Natsu as he could get. His eyes were shadowed, his features drawn, and his smile tight, but Natsu couldn't blame him. No one had escaped unscathed.

If Gray wasn't avoiding him, Natsu might have laughed at him for what great pains he was taking to keep Juvia satisfied. And he might warn him that he was going to give her the wrong idea again if he kept trying so hard. And maybe advise him that he didn't need to guilt himself into hanging around her all the time just because she had nearly gotten killed trying to sacrifice herself. _Gray _had tried to sacrifice himself—more times than Natsu cared to count—and they were hardly falling at _his _feet and singing his praises for it. Idiot.

But maybe it didn't matter, because Natsu would never say any of that anyway. Maybe a barbed comment or some pointed ribbing, but that was about the closest they'd get to any kind of heart-to-heart. Gray could sort out his own messes. And if he made his stalking problem worse, Natsu would just laugh from the sidelines. That was how they'd always been. That was how Natsu had thought they'd always be.

"Are you ready?" Erza asked as the crowd clustered around her dispersed and she swanned back over to the team. She clapped her hands together, eyes gleaming, and Natsu didn't know what had her so excited but he was starting to wish he'd listened to Happy and snuck out while he had the chance. "Everyone else is off to work, so we can head out now."

"Can we have a break instead?" Happy asked hopefully.

Erza gave him a withering glare. He withered appropriately.

Satisfied that he was sufficiently cowed, Erza's smile returned to full wattage. "I have the perfect assignment for us today!"

Lucy smiled back with more enthusiasm than either Natsu or Happy could muster. "What will we be working on?"

"Well, there's this bakery in–"

"Really?" Natsu groaned. "Another bakery? Don't you think we should, you know, work on something more useful?"

Erza glowered. "Bakeries are useful."

"Of course they are," Lucy said in a placating tone. Her smile had dimmed a little, but she shot Natsu a warning look. "It's just that this would be the fourth bakery in as many weeks. It seems like there might be enough bakeries to fill the need now, so should we maybe work on something else first and then come back to the rest?"

Erza's sigh was long-suffering. "I've spread all the assignments out among the guild. There are teams working on all the different types of shops and streets and houses all over the city. And Lamia Scale, Blue Pegasus, and some of the others have been doing great work on the outlying areas."

"We're just saying–"

"There's a library next door."

Lucy paused, mouth half-open and eyes gleaming.

"We lost her," Happy groaned.

"That sounds like a great plan!" she said. "You've been doing such a great job organizing everything—surely they can spare us for one more bakery."

Once both girls were on board, resistance was futile. Happy contented himself with a few grumbles he was careful to keep under his breath, and Natsu with one last glance back at Gray.

"Do you want to invite him?" Erza asked, making Natsu jump. Her eyes were much too knowing, and he wasn't sure he liked it. "He's supposed to be working on some houses over in one of the eastside neighborhoods with Juvia, Gajeel, and Levy, but if we can do a team–"

"No, that's okay," Natsu said a little too quickly. "Let him hang out with them if he wants. He doesn't have to _always _be with us."

The girls exchanged a look as he tromped out of the guild. They followed behind, and no one raised the subject again.

They had to walk halfway across the city to get to the target bakery—many transportation lines were still down, which was less of a loss considering that a fair number of streets were still torn up anyway—and Natsu tried to pay attention to the banter along the way. He had never been one for moping.

The cobblestones leading up to the bakery and surrounding shops had been ripped out of the ground and lay in piles of rubble that had been moved to the edges of the street. A first glance suggested that most of them were unusable, but such a peripheral part of town would have to wait for a shipment of new brick and stone. But at least if the shops were up and running and supplies were shipped in, people could get what they needed by foot until the streets were repaired.

"Watch your footing," Erza cautioned. Lucy promptly twisted her ankle on a loose cobblestone and bit out a most unladylike curse.

The bakery was all in pieces, the roof caved in and a gaping hole torn into the side. Beams stuck out of the wreckage like rotten teeth, and glass sprinkled the floors and sidewalk with crystal shards. Still, it wasn't nearly as bad off as half the city.

They got to work clearing out the debris and gathering the tools and materials they'd need from one of the strategic supply depots Blue Pegasus had helped set up in central locations around the city and outlying areas. They were no architects, but they'd had plenty of practice repairing the guild hall time and again over the years. And it wasn't the first time Magnolia had taken some damage and needed fixing. Whatever they lacked in competence, they made up for in sheer magical manpower. They could simply rebuild faster than non-magical citizens, although the non-mages had also banded together in the wake of catastrophe and become a formidable force of their own.

But for all everyone had come together and all the resilience they had shown and all the uplifting talk of _overcoming _and _rising above_, it still just seemed small and broken to Natsu as he stood in the rubble of someone's livelihood, staring at the shattered display cases and overturned chairs and missing wall. He didn't see resilience—he saw destruction. It was a strange feeling. He was used to optimism.

The sound of wood scraping on wood heralded Erza's arrival as she wedged herself through the doorway, thick replacement beam balanced on her shoulder. She dropped it to the floor with a grunt.

"Let's go, Natsu. We need a bunch more of these, or you can go help Lucy finish cleaning out debris."

"It's a lot of damage," Natsu observed, sweeping his sandal across the floor with a tinkling of glass.

"Compared to Mira's project, this is a cakewalk. Mm, cake… Honestly, Natsu, don't you think you should get some different shoes? You're going to cut your feet up again."

"Yeah," he said. "I guess."

Erza didn't reply immediately, but then she cleared her throat. "I know the city is a huge mess, but we've been making remarkable progress. Seeing all the guilds and citizens working together to repair everything is really something. At least we have some practice after Tartaros made such a mess of things. We rebuilt then, and we'll rebuild as good as new now."

"Yeah." Natsu's gaze slid across the broken shell of a building. "Demons sure wreck everything."

Erza was quiet for so long that he almost thought she had given up on him and left to fetch more supplies, but then she dropped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed firmly. "_Zeref_ wrecked everything," she said. "_We _are fixing it."

Natsu wondered at the emphasis on her words, but he didn't look too closely. He looked at the battered room instead, trying to imagine new beams bolstering the ceiling, display cases whole and guarding colorful confections, people bustling in and out to claim sweet treats with smiles plastered on their faces. They weren't quite there yet, but he hoped they would be, soon.

But then, he figured a building was one of the easier wounds they needed to heal.

* * *

Natsu managed to sneak out from under Erza's nose when they ran out of wood and she volunteered to fetch another load. Technically, he was supposed to be helping Lucy and Happy nail down some supports in the meantime, but he'd been lugging building material around all day and needed a minute to recover. Erza was a beast to still be running around unfazed.

He slid out the back door—back on its hinges again—and wandered next door. The whole street was looking pretty bleak, but at least it wasn't nearly as bad as the site they'd been working on for the past couple weeks. The eastern shopping district had been totally annihilated.

The building next door was taller, with pretentious columns framing the doorway that looked especially out of place next to the bakery and nondescript building on the other side. One of the columns was on its side across the entranceway, and they were both cracked and crumbling to reveal the cheap plaster packed inside.

Natsu shook his head and kicked at stray bits of brick as he drifted down the street, wincing when they rebounded off his toes. And then he kicked a rock that was not a rock.

He bent down to pick up the book. It was battered, cover scuffed and scarred, pages tattered and smeared with dirt. He flipped through it, eyes skimming over the neat rows of text without reading them. His lip curled.

What a useless thing, a book. The only thing more useless was the crumbling building behind it: a vault full of the things.

So he did what he often did when faced with something particularly annoying or useless: he set it on fire. He watched it burn with frank fascination, noting how the cover shriveled like a dying thing and the pages blackened and crumbled to ash.

"What are you _doing_?" Lucy cried, making him jump in surprise. She must have a sixth sense when it came to anything book-related. She had appeared behind him as if by magic, and he shifted guiltily from foot to foot.

"It's just a book," he grumbled.

"Just a book? _Just _a book? Natsu, we're supposed to be saving what we can and rebuilding the rest, not destroying what's left. And books are _amazing_."

Natsu didn't see the appeal. "They're boring. And there are tons more inside."

"_Every _book is special and different. You can't just exchange them like that. It's not as if they're identical."

"They all seem kind of the same to me. Just a bunch of words on a page. Everything is boring and the same every time. What's written there is all you get. When you hit the end, that's the end. None of the characters or adventures have the chance to change or become more interesting. It all seems very boring and useless to me."

Lucy puffed out her cheeks, and Natsu almost smiled. Sometimes it was fun just to rile her up a little.

"But that's so _wrong_. The whole appeal of books is that they're personal to you." She hesitated, her ire fading, and bit her lip. "An author doesn't write out every little thing that happens along the way or every single thought a character has, so you get to fill in the blanks," she said more quietly. "There's a lot you don't see written between the lines. And even once you hit the end of the book, the story lives on in your imagination and can become anything you want it to be. I think books are beautiful like that."

Natsu couldn't say that made a whole lot of sense to him, but then again, he wasn't much of a reader himself. He wondered why Lucy was giving him such an odd look, but he couldn't read her expression and didn't have a lot of interest in reading anyway.

"If you say so," he said, trying to keep his skepticism out of his voice.

"I do." Lucy's smile seemed a little bit sad as she turned away. "Come on, Natsu. We'd better get back to work before Erza shows up."

At least they were on the same page about something.

Natsu left the ashes blowing away in the breeze as he followed Lucy back inside the bakery, but there was an itch in his ears like the rustling of pages that he couldn't quite drown out.

* * *

That evening, Natsu snuck out the back door of the guild to avoid Erza's watchful gaze. She had _said _they were done for the day and graciously allowed everyone a couple hours to rest at the guild before slinking home exhausted to their beds, but he wouldn't put it past her to change her mind.

He said goodnight to Lucy, briefly interrupted Happy's cringe-worthy flirting with Charle to let him know he was leaving, and made a break for it. The door had barely shut behind him before he drew up short.

Gray was leaning next to the doorway, one foot kicked back against the wall and a cigarette held loosely between his fingers. He looked just as startled to see Natsu.

"Natsu?"

Not _flame brain_, Natsu noted.

Natsu's mind was blank. "I thought you quit smoking," he said before thinking better of it.

A stupid thing to say. He _knew _Gray had quit, ages ago. He would have been able to smell the smoke clinging to him if he had picked it up again, like he could now. It was thick in the air, making him wrinkle his nose in distaste.

"I did." Gray's voice was huskier than usual from the smoke, and he cleared his throat. "I suppose I've just picked it up again."

Natsu didn't ask why. He could see it in the shadows veiling the demon slayer's eyes. Gray had his own demons to fight: demons from Zeref's most recent invasion, from Tartaros, maybe from the very beginning. Natsu did not comment on his vices, because he didn't think it was his place. Not anymore, at least, if it had ever been.

"I'm surprised you're not with Juvia," he said instead, grasping for something to say and coming up empty. It didn't seem as if they had much of anything to say to each other anymore. Or maybe there was too much, just too much that neither wanted to say. "You seem to be joined at the hip these days."

Gray made a face and immediately tried to smooth it back out to a neutral expression. "I needed a minute."

Natsu translated this as _she's driving me crazy but I feel like I have to give her whatever she wants because she tried to sacrifice herself to save me from Invel_.

"If you need a break, come hang out with the team. The girls miss you."

Natsu rocked back on his heels and darted a glance towards the side of the building, where he'd like to be disappearing right now. The discomfort creasing the demon slayer's face suggested that Gray felt much the same. But apparently not even the guilt of ditching his closest companions could tempt him back just yet.

"Ah… Yes, of course."

Natsu translated this as _absolutely not and you know it_.

And it made him angry. He was sick of tiptoeing around while Gray hid in the shadows and kept his distance. He was sick of limbo. If things were over, he wanted at least an acknowledgement of it. He was ready to force things to a head, if only because he was tired of avoiding them. He was spoiling for a fight.

"Fight me," he demanded, never one to mince words.

The demon slayer stared at him as if he'd grown a second head, although the demand itself should not be surprising. Maybe he was taken aback that Natsu hadn't just punched him in the face first and made demands later. Once upon a time, that was exactly what Natsu would have done. Now he only curled his fists, narrowed his eyes, and slid one foot back to adjust his body into an aggressive position.

Gray took another drag on his cigarette and watched Natsu with hooded eyes. "No thanks."

No thanks? _No thanks?_

Natsu saw red. How dare Gray dismiss him like a whining child?

"Why not?" he demanded. "Worried what will happen if you kill me?"

The demon slayer winced and blew out a curl of gray smoke. "Yeah, that was not our shining moment, was it? I'm not interested in killing you."

"Oh, really? You're a demon slayer, aren't you? Isn't that your job?"

Gray went still and studied Natsu with slightly narrowed eyes. "No, it's not."

"Not even for E.N.D.?"

The demon slayer sighed through his nose. He looked off past Natsu. Then he stubbed out his cigarette on the brick wall behind him and tossed it into the grass. Natsu wanted to tell him not to litter or smoke or make promises to your dead dad that you couldn't keep.

"I'm hardly an expert," Gray said finally, "but it sounded to me like you were human before Zeref got his hands on you. And you worked hard enough and lived crazy enough to make yourself human again after. My job is only to hunt demons, and you seem human twice over to me."

Natsu looked up at the sky. There was a knot somewhere deep in his chest, winding ever tighter, and he wasn't sure what it meant. He cleared his throat.

"Ah. Well, does that mean you'll stop avoiding me because I'm a demon now?"

"I just said you weren't a demon. I'm avoiding you because we flipped out and attacked each other for no good reason in the middle of a war. Does this mean you're not going to keep avoiding me for attacking you?"

"I'm not avoiding you because we fought. I'm avoiding you because you tried killing yourself with iced shell again and it pissed me off."

"Oh." They were quiet for a minute, the silence heavy with unspoken words and the shadows they carried about them. Gray pinched the bridge of his nose. "Well, I'm not planning to kill you, not even when you're asking for someone to strangle the stupid out of you."

"Good, because you're not allowed to kill me. Or yourself."

"No killing—got it." Gray snorted. It was only a half-amused sound at best. "Man, we're a mess, aren't we?"

Natsu couldn't argue with that. There was a lot of healing to be done, and much of it would take far more effort than putting up some new walls and repainting. But it could be done, he was sure. He might be feeling bleak now, but he was an optimist at heart. If the team formed up again so that they could do their healing together, he was sure they'd come out okay in the end.

"Ask Erza to assign you to work with the rest of us tomorrow. Hanging around Juvia all the time doesn't seem to be doing wonders for your sanity. If there's not going to be any killing, we might as well reform the team."

Gray coughed out a laugh. The storm clouds shadowing his eyes weren't gone, but they seemed to thin out just a little.

"Sounds good," he said. "I guess it couldn't hurt to fix up a bakery or two."

"Bakery and library."

"Ah, Erza's been bribing Lucy to keep you in line, huh?"

"They'll be keeping you in line too, unless you want to tell them no."

"Heaven forbid."

Gray offered Natsu a crooked little smile like an olive branch, and Natsu felt the corners of his lips twitch in response.

And for a moment, they weren't demon slayer and demon, just two humans who had happened to be best friends once and might be again.

* * *

**emmahoshi: That darn amnesia lol Huh. Well, I guess canon was pretty skim-worthy by the end. To be honest, I'm a little rusty on it too, at this point. The summary was a little bit intentionally misleading, but I thought it would be obvious pretty quickly. Although I did leave more between the lines than usual instead of spelling everything out. Everyone's part had to do with some aspect of Natsu coping with his newfound demon-ness, just in slightly different ways. Gray's was just the most blunt lol Yay, I'm hoping 2020 will be a better year. 2019 was a huge mess X) Oof, I've had my glasses even longer, but I don't remember what year or anything. Maybe I selectively forgot because I hated them at the time XD**


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